...Fake reviews include, but aren’t limited to, bot-generated reviews and reviews that are influenced by the seller.

Vendors (those are products you see as “sold by Amazon”) can distribute their merchandise to semiprofessional reviewers through the Vine program, where users provide reviews in exchange for free products.

Amazon and Walmart were recently cited in a report by the U.S. Government Accountability Office that found counterfeit cosmetic products contained dangerous substances such as cyanide and lead. This report also noted that in a random sampling 1 in 5 products purchased were counterfeit.

Out of nearly 3,000 vitamins for sale on Amazon’s website, 30pc were found to be fake and or unreliable...

Fake reviews are everywhere online and they’ve probably influenced some of your purchases. Fake reviews can be positive or negative, and they’re obviously unethical and harmful. But they’re the symptom of a larger problem with e-commerce and online platforms.

...In fact, 80% of consumers say they rely on feedback from other customers. But not all of the reviews are trustworthy.

As many as half of reviews on Walmart.com may be "inauthentic and unreliable," while about 30 percent of Amazon reviews are considered suspect, Fakespot estimates.

An increase of fake reviews are hitting major retail websites. An analysis of online customer reviews from Fakespot found 52 percent of those posted on Walmart's website are inauthentic or unreliable. It found 30 percent of Amazon's reviews are fake.

Artificial Intelligence backed data authentication platform Fakespot announced it has surpassed 3 billion reviews analyzed, up 50% from the end of 2017.

The Federal Trade Commission brought its first successful case against a weight loss supplement maker who’d been buying Amazon reviews since October 2014.

Fake reviews are increasingly prevalent across many top retailer websites, according to a study from Fakespot, which analyzes online customer reviews for fake or unreliable reviews.

Buyer, beware — that last-minute stocking stuffer from Amazon may not have earned its five-star rating legitimately.

Finally, there is also a fantastic tool available to confirm your suspicions called Fakespot. This tool uses an algorithm to find patterns, in order to filter out fake reviews.

When in doubt, enlist help from technology. Websites like Fakespot give shoppers a sense of how trustworthy the reviews are for a given product.

With the holidays right around the corner an estimated 76 percent of Americans will do their holiday shopping on Amazon. ...Tons of 5-star reviews are great, but are they real? The website Fakespot is dedicated to helping consumers identify questionable online reviews.

Fakespot.com is a website dedicated to “fact checking” the reviews on Amazon, Yelp, TripAdvisor and the Apple App Store.

If you rely on reviews when booking your next holiday or purchasing the latest gadget, there's a tool that can help you separate opinion from fiction. Fakespot is a new free tool that allows consumers to filter reviews in order to find those that are real in a bid to crack down on false and biased reviews.

Shoppers curious about the quality of reviews on a product can copy and paste the product page's link into a search bar on the Fakespot homepage and receive a grade on the overall reliability of the reviews, ranging from F to A.

Fake reviews -- positive or negative recommendations that may not accurately reflect a product's quality -- are still an issue for Amazon. You can check the validity of reviews by putting the product link into Fakespot.

Data analytics company Fakespot, for one, uses artificial intelligence to provide an instant analysis of the reliability of a product’s reviews.

One big determining factor when shopping online is how good or bad the reviews are? But what if the reviews are fake? It happens, sadly more often than many retailers would like to admit.So how do you know which reviews are reliable and which were written by people paid to hype up a product? Check out Fakespot.com.

Consumers can type in a product number in the FakeSpot.com website to find out if the reviews are legit.

Fakespot cleverly looks at online reviews and makes sure the reviews are genuine, helping buyers make sure they can trust the reviews they see.

The Krazy Koupon Lady featured Fakespot on the Today Show. "Just copy and paste any Amazon product link into Fakespot, and within seconds, you’ll see whether it earned its 5-star reviews or bought them."

Web tools, such as the Fakespot app, can also help you assess whether reviews on your Yelp business page are inauthentic, which may provide further ammunition.

Wondering if that toaster really deserves five stars? Fakespot, an online tool that helps you separate junk reviews from the useful ones is here to save the day!... Even Google has finally started cracking down. They also use the program Fakespot to identify fake reviewers with better accuracy.

Thankfully, there's Fakespot, a free site that analyzes Amazon product reviews to help you separate the wheat from the, well, fake. ...The service also offers browser extensions for Chrome, Firefox and Safari, all of which make it even simpler: Just click the Fakespot icon in your toolbar for instant analysis. There's now an iOS option as well; it lets you use Fakespot on the go.

Fakespot made the #2 spot on this list of unbelievably useful websites! "When buying essentially anything online, I always look at the reviews and the ratings. Except that, uh, sometimes people write fake reviews, ruining everything. Fakespot will help sort out which reviews are fake and which are genuine, so that you can get exactly what you paid for, and not a weird mesh tank top with an extra opening instead."

Fakespot is genius. They give every product on Amazon a grade, A-F. “A” doesn’t mean the product is good or bad. It means the reviews are good and you can trust them to make your purchase. And “F” doesn’t always mean don’t buy. But it definitely means don’t trust a word those reviewers say.

There’s a lot of fakery online, and that’s particularly true with product reviews. Fortunately, you can avoid those on Amazon with Fakespot, a Chrome extension that analyzes reviews and shows you which ones are genuine and which aren’t. Take that, fakers.

Use Fakespot before making your next electronic, beauty, fashion, or household purchase. You can also visit Fakespot’s website to see their curated lists of the most authentic products by genre.

The piece, originally featured on Houston, Texas' KHOU, subsequently got picked up by almost 40 other news sources from around the country. A quote from the article: "If you’re on Amazon, you can also use Fakespot. The site was created to help consumers identify products with many fake reviews."

...Fakespot’s statistical analysis tries to spot trends and give you an idea of how likely the reviews below a given product are fake. If this site doesn’t suspect anything is wrong with the reviews, there’s a good chance you’ve got nothing to worry about.

...e-commerce sites, such as Amazon, have been struggling to deal with a growing number of fraudulent reviews, that may raise a company's rating but don't represent the product they are selling. ...Now, he always checks a product on Fakespot, a site that analyzes reviews on Amazon and Yelp, examining the language, timing and reviewer history.

It can be seriously hard to spot scams these days, even for someone who spends every waking moment on a digital screen like yours truly, but FakeSpot is great at separating great products from the frauds. FakeSpot can scan any Amazon listing and instantly know if any of the reviews are fake.

Fakespot isn’t just about sussing out the fake reviews... The company recently launched Trustwerty to highlight the good stuff.

Now that the holidays are approaching, chances are you'll be doing at least some of your gift shopping on Amazon.com. But before you click "buy" on the first favorably-reviewed item you find, take a minute to learn about how you can avoid getting duped by the site's fake reviews and phony products.

Upsetting as it is, it's also not uncommon for companies to produce fake, glowing reviews to boost appeal. Amazon fights this, but some still slip under the net. Fakespot.com identifies how genuine reviews are Again. All you have to do is paste a link, and the site will analyse a product's user reviews and grade their trustworthiness for you.

Listen to David Pogue's essential tips for saving money on WNYC's Leonard Lopate Show

Shopping for deals on Amazon, it's tough enough making sure you're getting a real TV and not an empty TV box. So when it comes to their clusterf*ck of reviews, who knows what you can trust? Fakespot knows.

The literary masterpieces we call Amazon user reviews aren't always forthright...but it's also not uncommon for a company to outright fake batches of glowing reviews to boost a product's appeal. ...The idea with Fakespot is to quickly get a sense of just how genuine those reviews are. Again, all you have to do is paste a link — Fakespot will then analyze the product's user reviews and grade them on their trustworthiness.

FakeSpot, which reports having analysed 984,345 Amazon products and 3,984 Yelp listings to date, gives users a chance to do some investigating if they think a review looks a bit suspect.

This free service scans product reviews and reviewers to see if there’s anything that might be deceptive (fake reviews are a real thing!). In just a couple of seconds, you receive a letter grade based on how many product reviews seem both useful and legit.

Fakespot grades the reliability of Amazon and Yelp reviews. Copy the the link, and then the site will instantly analyze if it's a fake. It will use a letter grade that rates how much you should trust the review.

As Black Friday is just around the corner, check to see if the reviews that you are reading are factual ​before you buy online. FakeSpot is an Internet tool dedicated to helping Amazon shoppers weed out fake reviews and find the most authentic products.

Nevertheless, the proliferation of fake reviews means consumers need to be cautious when relying on ratings. Tools are available to help shoppers figure out whether reviews can be trusted, such as Fakespot.

Wondering if a toaster really deserves five stars? Copy the Amazon product page URL, paste it in at Fakespot, and click “analyze.” The site replies with a letter grade that rates how much you should trust the review.

Suspicious of a product? Run the Amazon link through Fakespot first. The site will show you a grade of the quality and authenticity of the product’s reviews.

I just wish I’d thought of this idea first

CNBC’s in-depth story about the trials small business owners face on Amazon points to Fakespot as the site to use to avoid counterfeits.

SimpleMost featured Fakespot in an article as one of “two simple tools to help you make the most of your Amazon purchase.”

...if you're on the fence about a certain product, especially one that doesn't have any professional feedback around the web, it's always good to be safe. This helps. The next time you find a deal or little-known gadget that seems too good to be true, just remember that it actually might be.

Fakespot's an online tool that helps you separate the junk reviews from the useful ones

It’s a great time-saver, quickly analysing all of the reviews on a page and working out whether they’re suspiciously positive or not, as well as figuring out who actually bought the product in question.

There are a few different options out there that will help you spot products with fake reviews, but we’ve found Fakespot to be one of the best available. The website couldn’t be easier to use.

"Spot fake reviews in seconds with this tool", Video

Then there are third party sites like FakeSpot, which analyzes not just the reviews on an Amazon product page, but other reviews written by the users on that page.

...how can a potential new consumer tell a fake or paid review from an honest one? Well, don't worry, Amazon shoppers, there's a web tool that can do exactly this.

Sometimes you can't trust the mass of four and five star ratings, and that is where Fakespot comes in. This website (there's also a Chrome extension) hoovers up the reviews for a given product, crunches some algorithms, and gives you an estimate of the number of questionable reviews.

Ben’s Bargains recommends Fakespot as a convenient alternative to taking on the chore of sifting through the many reviews yourself.

I love the data Fakespot delivers, especially when it comes to newer products that have few reviews. This has definitely earned a spot on my bookmarks bar.

Review data should offer greater transparency and protect consumer rights. But companies are playing the system. ...[Fakespot exists to] help the public identify which reviewed items were fake using machine learning and algorithms.

Skeptical consumers can put in a link to a product into Fakespot's site, which analyzes the reviews and determines the percentage of phony ratings. ...It's not always easy to pick a fake, especially if they're well crafted, although there's no lack of them: As many as 20 percent of all Internet reviews are fake